and commerce: who in pursuit of trade, reached out to all the countries
around them. The early history of most nations begins with gods and
demons, while here we have nothing of the kind; we see an immigrant
enter the country, marry one of the native women, and settle down; in
time a great nation grows up around him. It reminds one of the
information given by the Egyptian priests to Herodotus. "During the
space of eleven thousand three hundred and fort years they assert," says
Herodotus, "that no divinity has appeared in human shape, . . . they
absolutely denied the possibility of a human being's descent from a
god." If Plato had sought to draw from his imagination a wonderful and
pleasing story, we should not have had so plain and reasonable a
narrative. He would have given us a history like the legends of Greek
mythology, full of the adventures of gods and goddesses, nymphs, fauns,
and satyrs.

Neither is there any evidence on the face of this history that Plato
sought to convey in it a moral or political lesson, in the guise of a
fable, as did Bacon in the "New Atlantis," and More in the "Kingdom of
Nowhere." There is no ideal republic delineated here. It is a
straightforward, reasonable history of a people ruled over by their
kings, living and progressing as other nations have lived and progressed
since their day.

Plato says that in Atlantis there was "a great and wonderful empire,"
which "aggressed wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia," thus
testifying to the extent of its dominion. It not only subjugated Africa
as far as Egypt, and Europe as far as Italy, but it ruled "as well over
parts of the continent," to wit, "the opposite continent" of America,
"which surrounded the true ocean." Those parts of America over which it
ruled were, as we will show hereafter, Central America, Peru, and the